A / B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers

I give it five stars because the book is concise and written by experts who know what they are talking about. They had access to success stories from popular companies.This book is for people who have website with sufficient traffic to perform the experiments.I liked the fact that the book writer is even the founder of Optimizely, the popular tool for A/B testing. He can talk with authority. It is not just theory. Optimizely is a successful and trusted tool. I did not like the chapters about statistics at the end. I would look for different books for that topic, but it was okay to include that to show that A/B testing is based on scientific approaches.Great book if you are totally new to A/B testing. It also gives some good ideas about things to test.

As someone who has been running controlled experiments (e.g. A/B tests) for over 10 years at Amazon and Microsoft, I found it fun to read with motivating examples that are easy to understand by anyone thinking of trying A/B testing.This is a book that is great to convince an org to try A/B testing, but don't expect it to explain the technical side and the pitfalls, which you might find in peer-reviewed papers like these on exp-platform:- Controlled Experiments on the Web: Survey and Practical Guide- Seven Rules of Thumb for Web Site Experimenters- Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: Five Puzzling Outcomes Explained- Online Controlled Experiments at Large Scale- Unexpected Results in Online Controlled ExperimentsSome things that are could be improved:- The Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC) is not just a measure of success. This is critical and the authors' experience with simple funnels may be limiting here. In more complicated scenarios, coming up with a good OEC that is predictive of future success is harder. For example, search engines don't directly optimize for query share and revenue (see pitfalls paper above).- The use of A/B testing is not just for front-end features. There are great examples of back-end improvements, such as relevance for search.- One of the more important observations by groups doing A/B testing is around the importance of web site performance, which is absent here.- The authors suggest an incorrect procedure for ending experiments: "Once the test reaches statistical significance, you'll have your answer" and "When the test has reached a statistically significant conclusion , the tester sends a follow-up with results and the key takeaways." This procedure will have more false positives than expected. The correct procedure is to determine the duration in advance (e.g., a full week or two), then check for stat-sig at that point.

***WARNING***This book (and the parent company the authors run - Optimizely) is heavily criticized in what is perhaps THE book on A/B testing and running trustworthy online experiments ("Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments"). The authors suggest peaking at p-values in order to stop tests early once statistical significance has been reached. There are articles about it such as "How Optimizely -almost- Got me Fired!".As of the writing of this review, the people at Optimizely have corrected their evaluations and added A/A testing to their glossary in the later editions.---------Review-----------Fifty-thousand view of what A/B testing is, why it is important, and how it is used by the likes of the Clinton-Bush foundation, ETSY, Chrome, IGN, and political campaigns.Early on, the authors lay the ground rules and spend the rest of the book reinforcing their points through several relevant industry examples.Read it if you need the basics and only the basics. Skip it if you need the nitty-gritty details.Recommended for a light read with plenty of use-cases!

This is a great, easy to read guide to A/B testing . Digital marketing is custom built to test one idea against another with near instantaneous results. Read how A/B testing helped Netflix grow to become the leading online content provider and helped Barack Obama raise millions. Even better, it will give you dozens of ideas that you can use to improve your own web site. FYI, this is a book that I give clients to read...

I have been optimizing landing pages for about seven years.A/B testing can often be somewhat of a dark art. Numerous public articles & blog posts cite tests with sample sizes so ludicrously small you are left wondering if the writer completed high school math. Not here, in this book the authors stick to mass scale examples, with full color before and after shots.All of the big points fit in exactly with my personal experience -- such as things like removing elements rather than adding them.The big problem with this book is the big print. I read it very, very fast. I will not even say how fast less this review seems unbelievable. No complaints, a few small things already are sticking out in my mind, leaving me certain that the book will pay for itself both in cost and time. Considering I once paid $500 for a book on landing page optimization many years back..A/B testing, and user experience optimization in general, is a big topic. It is a scarce topic as well. There are only so many people who have access to the millions of humans it takes to perform a truly mass scale, long term iterative optimization. The authors aren't releasing any deep optimization secrets, but they are pointing you in the right direction to tackle this utterly complex subject.

A/B testing is a way of life at many big technology companies, but if you've never been on a team that runs experiments it can be hard to do correctly. This book covers the basics of how to run an A/B test well and backs it up with lots of examples of real tests that different types of companies have run.If your company doesn't run A/B tests yet, or if you want inspiration for the types of things you can test, pick this book up.